HUMAN
Name: Kailyn (Davis) Olnes
Age: 34
Residence: Fairbanks, Alaska
Occupation: State of Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation
First Year Ran Iditarod: 2022
How Many Years Involved With Iditarod: 1
Iditarod Role: Musher
Current Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Date of Photo: June 19, 2026
Temperature: 78F outdoors
Question 1: What is it about running sled dogs that you love so much?
What I love about running sled dogs is taking a group of individual dogs and putting them together in a team, just working on getting to know how they are as individuals, but also how they work together. It’s like teaching a group of kindergartners, making the seating charts and some kids are really goofy and can’t sit next to each other and some kids work really well together and just working through those puzzles and getting to know them all as a group. I just love the teamwork of it and also obviously the solitude and being out in nature and being with a group of your buddies kind of exploring.
Question 2: What, who or how and when & why did you first get involved running the Iditarod?
I got involved running the Iditarod because growing up in Anchorage in elementary school, we followed the race. I did a read program where the number of pages we read in a book would correspond to miles on the trail and we would move our little icon and kind of mush the trail through reading. And so that got me following the race.
Growing up, my parents took me to the ceremonial start and it was really exciting seeing all the mushers. When I was seven years old, I decided I was going to do that someday. And so when I graduated from high school, I connected with an Anchorage musher, Christine Roloff and she was training for her first Iditarod at the time. And so learned how to run dogs from her, got completely hooked on it, saw Christine finish her first Iditarod and it was pretty much all downhill from there.
Question 3: Tell me about just one of your most memorable Iditarod experiences running the Iditarod.
My most memorable experience running the Iditarod was going into Shaktoolik, leaving the previous checkpoint. We got a weather check and online, the weather said it was fine and then we quickly realized going into the checkpoint itself that it was much windier than the weather app had portrayed. And so we got stuck in a pretty gnarly ground blizzard. The dogs were doing really well. I was a little nervous, but coming up the road into Shaktoolik, I couldn’t see anything because of the storm and I didn’t actually know I was on the road. And I remember stopping the dogs and getting off the sled and climbing on top of snow berm where they had plowed the road, still not knowing I was on the road. And I almost actually pulled my team up and over the snow berm thinking for some reason that was the way we were supposed to go and I’m glad I didn’t. Eventually climbed back down and decided to just keep going. And then a few meters later, the dogs just stopped and I couldn’t figure out why they had stopped. And eventually was able to make out that there was a person standing with my leaders and we were in the checkpoint and I had no idea. And so that was a big relief. Luckily the dogs figured out where they were going because I did not, but we got there and then the checkpoint officials in Shaktoolik told us that their wind gauge had bottomed out at 70 miles an hour and we didn’t know how windy it actually was, but somewhere 70 miles an hour or higher, got all the dogs tucked in behind the checkpoint building and used straw and boxes of Heet to build little barricades so they’re all protected from the wind and had a really good nap and some really good food. And that was definitely my favorite checkpoint.
What in life do you know for sure?:
What I know for sure in life is that not much is certain, but the one thing that I can say is that we will always have dogs and always be involved in this sport one way or another.